The second stage entailed mailing the questionnaire to the headquarters of three thousand wholesalers in Hyogo and Osaka prefectures. Osaka's sample consisted of two thousand and Hyogo's sample consisted of one thousand (N=3000). A total of 577 instruments were returned for a response rate of 19.2%. Of the 577 responses, 545 were considered viable for data analysis as thirty-two were deemed unusable (n=545). Subjects were asked to indicate their approvals of each service on a standard five-point Likert scale, with "1" indicating strongly disagree and "5" indicating strongly agree.